The End Of San Francisco is an episodic memoir in which readers are brought nose-to-page with a narrative mélange of childhood anorexia, sexual abuse, and present-day attempts at healing. Images cascade and collide with one another in an accomplished literary cadenza of salvation.

Leaving The City

The End of San Francisco
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
City Lights. 186 pages, $15.95

AUTHOR Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the artistic love child of Jean Genet and David Wojnarowicz, deconstructing language swathed in unbridled sensuality, while flinging readers into a disrupted, chaotic life of queer anarchy. I first encountered Sycamore a decade ago at a D-I-Y alternative space in San Francisco, reading stories drawn from sex work.

Since that time, s/he has prolifically chronicled a life of a strident anti-assimilationism, meanwhile evolving both as a writer and activist. Through novels, anthologies, cultural writing, and community organizing, Sycamore torches normative assumptions and “the violence of the status quo,” seizing self-determination through direct action and political rage. The End Of San Francisco is an episodic memoir in which readers are brought nose-to-page with a narrative mélange of childhood anorexia, sexual abuse, and present-day attempts at healing. Images cascade and collide with one another in an accomplished literary cadenza of salvation.

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